Customer service is challenging, but the key to success can be found within your own team.

By Elba Quintero, CSR for Wizeline Roadmap

I have been a Customer Service Representative for Wizeline Roadmap for a year now. When people ask me what I do, I always say “You know when you go to a webpage and there is a message that says ‘Ask me if you need any help!’? Well, I’m the person on the other side of the chat. My picture is there and everything!”

However, this is just the short version of the story, since most people don’t have thirty minutes to hear the real deal. I decided to write a blog post where I can share what I do, some lessons learned over these last year, and a few tips for other CSR’s just starting out.

Understand your product’s function

We need to start with the basics: In order for you to be able to truly help a user and guide them through your product, you need to understand your users.

What are your users expecting from your product?

Who are the different personas?

What are they trying to achieve?

What goals do they have?

Who do they work with?

What tools do they use?

What are they worried about?

If you understand this information, it will be much easier for you to answer their inbound questions and requests correctly. I encourage you to ask your teammates these questions so you can see the product from different perspectives, like Engineering, UX, or Product Management. It is also a great opportunity to meet and chat with members of your team – especially when you’re the new person!

Be engaged in standup

I have to be honest: I really like going to our standup meetings. This is an opportunity to see how the product is developing, what milestones have been achieved, and how close (or how far) the team is to achieving its next big feature.

I have learned a lot about our product, Roadmap, in these smaller gatherings. And best of all, there are times when I leave standups with even more questions than I had before. These questions have prompted me to do a lot of research within the team and online. If something wasn’t clear to me, I needed to ask. These experiences brought me closer to the people, processes, and product itself.

At the same time, keep in mind that standups are an open forum for you as a Customer Support rep. You can bring the voice of the users to the conversation, and provide updates about reactions to a new feature or feedback on the product. I sometimes just use the opportunity to thank someone for helping resolve an issue quickly.

It’s important to make sure that you raise any blockers. In my opinion, identifying and working to resolve blockers is one of the main goals of this meeting. I really love standups because it is one of the most palpable representations of teamwork.

Get involved with other departments

When we deploy new features, our knowledge base has to be ready with articles to show users how this new feature works, and try to answer all their FAQs.

This process required me to write the copy for these articles, but it’s really a team effort:

#1 Read like a Product Manager . To start, I always have in hand the feature spec, where I can take the important information directly from Product Management. This document works as the base for additional documentation and gives us an idea of where the product is going.

#2 Think like a UX designer. After gathering information from standups, I have a quick chat with someone on our UX team to guide me through the feature. I always want to know their perspective and how the flow is supposed to work.

#3 Test like an Engineer. A few days before deployment, I ask the Engineering team to give me access to test environments. This gives me the ability to use the feature beforehand, see the flow, and even report a bug (in case I find one). The dynamic test environments give me the opportunity to write instructions step by step, so users can understand exactly what to do. I also have the chance to make GIFs to share a visual of interacting with a new feature.

#4 Copy edit like a Technical Writer. After I complete my first draft, I make sure to share it with our Technical Writers, Marketing team, and Product Management. This way, we make sure that the final articles are understood and edited from different perspectives. After the proper edits have been made, I go ahead and publish!

Learn from your experiences

Working in Customer Service for Wizeline Roadmap has been an amazing experience for me. I have learned so much about the product, our users, and the Wizeliners that build the product. This journey of mine has been full of knowledge, achievements, and contentment. I hope that, with this post, CSRs find something that can be useful for them in their everyday lives.